Non-contrastive features and categorical patterning in Chinese diminutive suffixation : M[F] or I[F]?*

The influence of non-contrastive phonetic details such as intergestural timing, stop release burst and articulatory effort expense on phonological patterning has been discussed extensively in Browman & Goldstein (1992), Flemming (1995), Jun (1995), Kirchner (1997), Silverman (1997), Boersma (1998), Gordon (1999), Hayes (1999), Steriade (1999, 2000), Zhang (forthcoming), among others. Even though the way in which phonology incorporates phonetic factors is debatable (see Hayes & Steriade, forthcoming for an overview of the debate and §3.1.1 for more detailed discussion), the fact that there exist phonological patterns that are governed by phonetic factors seems less so. In this paper, without committing myself to any view of how phonetic factors are encoded in phonology, I present the case of Chinese retroflex suffixation in support of the relevance of non-contrastive phonetic features to categorical phonological patterning. In addition, I argue that MF constraints (Lombardi 1995, 1998, Casali 1996, Pulleyblank 1996, Causley 1997, Walker 1999; henceforth M[F]) are needed to account for the data in question. In many northern Chinese dialects, a retroflex approximant }y} can be suffixed to a noun to indicate the diminutive or endearing meaning of the noun. In this paper, I focus on the interaction between the retroflex